Chapter 36 RONAN
Ronan
I sat out on that terrace and convinced myself I’d figured out how to live without this.
I had it half figured out, too. I was going to work, and walk the beach, and take my pills, and be a man who survived the summer a nurse put him back together only to take him apart on her way out.
Tessa is asleep on my chest. Dead to the world, one hand curled loose over my heart, her hair everywhere, her breathing slow and deep against my skin.
I never stood a chance.
I ease out from under her, and she makes a small sound and burrows into the warm place I left, and I stand there in the early light watching her sleep in my bed.
She looks peaceful. After the week she’s carried, the hearing, the fight, all of it finally set down, she’s earned every hour of this, and I’m not going to cost her a single one.
Downstairs, I make coffee, and it’s not until I’m reaching for the second mug that I catch what I’m doing—building hers without one conscious thought.
I leave her mug ready by the machine and take mine outside.
* * *
The water is fifty feet from the terrace, a strip of pale rock above the tide line, and the morning is what the coast gives you after it’s tried to drown you all night. Washed clean. The sea flat and silver, the air rinsed, everything lit up.
I stand at the edge with my coffee, and I take the quarter out of my pocket.
Twenty-one years. It was in my pocket the day I signed the lease on the first office, and the day I signed the papers that made Synapse real, and the day a doctor stood at the foot of my bed and used the word lucky.
That was the deal I made with myself. Need nothing.
Owe nothing. Carry your own weight and nobody can drop you.
I walk it across my fingers one more time.
Movement catches the corner of my eye. Tessa, on the steps, her mug in one hand, in my gray cashmere sweater.
I close my hand around the quarter.
“Morning,” she says.
She puts her free arm around my waist and comes up on her toes, smiling. I bend and kiss her.
“Morning.”
She settles in against my side and drinks her coffee and looks out at the water.
“Walk with me,” I say. “I owe you one.”
* * *
The cove is ten minutes up the shoreline. We walk it hand in hand, no cane, no counting, and she talks the whole way, easy and unguarded, the way she hasn’t been in weeks. I told her about this walk before she left. First thing when you’re back, we’re walking it together.
A half-moon of pale stone, the tide low, the water coming in quiet the way it does here even on bad days. I stop at the waterline. She stops with me.
I hold up the quarter.
“You know what this is,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine. “Yes.” Quiet. Careful.
“I picked it up the day of your hearing. Found it on the nightstand, and it went straight back into my pocket.” I turn it over in my fingers.
“I gave it one job when I was a boy. Remind me that needing people is how you end up at a kitchen table with your face in your hands. For years it worked. Right up until number five walked into my house.”
I turn it over one more time. “Carrying it around this week, I finally understood what it actually does. It never kept me safe. It kept me alone.” I look at her. “I didn’t know the difference until you.”
A tear slips down her cheek. She doesn’t say anything.
Her face, the morning wind in her hair, the whole rest of my life standing at the edge of the water in my gray sweater. And I feel myself smile.
“I don’t need it anymore.”
I turn, and I throw it into the sea.
It goes up, spinning, flipping over itself, catching the light once, twice, way out over the water, and then it’s gone. No splash worth the name. Twenty-one years, and the tide doesn’t even pause.
Tessa lets out a breath with a whole week inside it.
Then her arms are around me, her face against my chest, and I wrap her up and press my mouth to her hair.
We stand there until the sun clears the water and the cove lights up all the way to the rocks, and somewhere behind us the house is waiting, and I find I’m in no hurry at all.
That’s new too. Since I was eleven I thought the trick was getting to the next thing faster than everyone in the room.
Turns out it was standing still in a cove with the right person and letting the next thing come to you.